If you haven’t read the report of the ABA Task Force on American Democracy, you should. It’s nearly 100 pages, with 34 recommendations. If that’s too much, read the press release. (See links below.)

And if you prefer to consume information about election reform via podcasts, this latest episode of “This Old Democracy” is for you.

Micah Sifry interviews one of the members of the ABA Task Force, Tom Rogers. Rogers is deeply invested in democratic reforms in part because of his professional expertise in the media business. As a top Hill staffer, Rogers helped write critical communications industry legislation that sought to expand diversity of viewpoints in our media landscape.

Rogers explained that the creation of the ABA Task Force was “a very brave and courageous move,” given the prominence of the legal community in public affairs. The ABA appointed two highly regarded co-chairs: Jeh Johnson, a former Homeland Security Secretary under President Obama, and Judge J. Michael Luttig, a former Court of Appeals judge, with strong conservative credentials.

After two years of hearings, discussions, working papers, revisions and votes, a final report was recently released. The legal community –lawyers, scholars, jurists, law students – should take heed. The report is a roadmap of urgent and practical reforms designed to strengthen democratic practice and institutions. Its end goal is restoring the American people’s trust and pride in both elections and politics itself.

Rogers zeroed in on two recommendations that he believes are critical to strengthening (or saving) the American experiment.

One of these should be very familiar to This Old Democracy listeners: fusion voting. Rogers believes that political polarization has poisoned the highest levels of our democracy. He sees fusion voting as a mechanism to “help consensus building, centrist driven candidates, which ⁓ we need more of, not less of.”

The ABA Task Force’s recommendation is particularly important for two reasons.

The first is that the ABA is the nation’s most well-known legal organization. Their support for a relatively obscure reform is unexpected and all the more valuable for being so. It is surely the first time the ABA has ever publicly asserted the need to move away from the two-party system. This is no small thing, and in a sense is a reflection of the depth of the crisis we are in. One can hope that the ABA’s call resonates in the relevant chambers.

The second is that it’s more than a call to do something in the sweet by-and-by. Fusion is the only one of the thirty-four Task Force recommendations that can be enacted reasonably quickly, and some members were very much aware of this. At this writing, courts in three states (New Jersey, Kansas, and Wisconsin) are considering whether the ban on fusion voting and parties is constitutional.

The ABA Task Force’s report is a rare moment of courageous consensus on the most important issue of our day: the battle for democracy itself. Read it if you can, and listen to Rogers explain some of its most salient features.

LINKS

Final report of the ABA Task Force on American Democracy

https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/office_president/democracy-task-force/2025-report-american-democracy.pdf

ABA press release

https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2025/09/aba-releases-final-report-democracy-task-force/